The Wedding He Watched From the Chair

The third song is the one that used to get him up, and everybody in that family knows it, and the band did not know it and played it anyway at twenty past nine.

Manny stayed in the chair.

He had a good table. Right at the edge of the floor, close enough to feel the boards go, under the strings of warm bulbs somebody had spent all Thursday putting up between the poles. There was a folded napkin by his glass that he had folded and unfolded about nine times without noticing. Half a slice of cake he was not going to eat. A little card with his name on it in his great niece's handwriting, with a heart drawn next to it because she is eleven and that is what you do.

His knees have been going for four years. Everyone knows about the knees in the way a family knows a fact, which is to say they know and they have stopped thinking about it. There was an operation in the spring that did some of what it was supposed to do. There is another one being talked about, in that vague way, for after Christmas.

None of that is the thing.

The thing is that Manny is the one who dances. He danced at his sister's wedding in a suit that did not fit. He danced at both of his daughters' weddings, the second one with a cast on his wrist. He is the one the cousins pull onto the floor at the point in the night when the older people are drifting off, and he goes, every time, and he is not even particularly good, and that is not the point and never was.

He is the one who dances. It is not a hobby. It is a piece of how the family knows itself. There are photographs on four different walls.

And at twenty past nine, at his great niece's wedding, under the bulbs he had helped put up on Thursday, the band played the third song and the floor filled and his youngest cousin came over grinning with her hand already out.

And he did the thing he has got good at. The face, the wave, the mock groan, the little gesture at the knee. She laughed and made a face back at him and went off with somebody else, and it took four seconds, and it was completely fine, and nobody saw anything at all.

Manny sat under the warm bulbs with his hand around a glass and watched the floor go.

His great niece was out there in her dress with her shoes already off, being spun by her brother, absolutely shining.

He was glad. That was true. He was so glad he could have cried about it and could not have told anybody which of the two things was doing it.

And underneath the gladness, quiet and steady and not going anywhere, was a grief with no funeral attached to it, because the man who danced at every wedding in this family had come to a wedding and stayed in the chair, and there is no word for that, and nobody was going to ask.

David asked to be told how frail he was

There is a psalm nobody prints on anything.

Psalm 39. A man who has been holding his tongue, deliberately, keeping quiet even about good things, because he does not trust what will come out if he opens his mouth. And when he finally does open it, this is what comes out:

Lord, make me to know mine end, and the measure of my days, what it is, that I may know how frail I am.

Read what he is asking for. He is not asking to be strengthened. He is not asking for the frailty to be removed, and he is not asking for a better attitude about it. He is asking God to tell him the truth about the size of his own life, because he has just noticed the edges of it and it has shaken him.

That is a man at a table at the edge of a floor.

And here is what I want you to see, more than anything else in this whole message: God let that psalm into the book. He did not edit it. He did not append a note underneath explaining what the psalmist should have said instead. It has a number and it sits in the middle of the songbook of God's people, and grown men have sung it out loud in worship for three thousand years.

You are not out of order tonight, and you were never required to be at peace with this in order to be welcome to God. That is what is written into the survival of Psalm 39 itself, and the Holy Spirit is the One who put a man's raw grief about his own frailty into Scripture and left it there on purpose.

LORD, make me to know mine end, and the measure of my days, what it is; that I may know how frail I am.Psalm 39:4

Grace does not arrive as a repair

I am not going to tell you the dancing is coming back.

I do not know that. Nobody writing to you knows that, and the ones who say it anyway are handing you a promise God did not make and leaving you to hold it when it does not come. That is not comfort. That is a debt.

And I am not going to do the other thing either, which is worse and much more common in religious rooms. I am not going to tell you it is time to accept it. I am not going to explain what God is teaching you through the knees, or find the silver lining in the chair, or suggest that this season has a purpose you are supposed to be locating by now. That is a stranger issuing a verdict on your life from a long way off, and you have had enough of those.

Here is what is actually on the table under those bulbs, and it is neither of those two things.

You have God Himself at this table, and He came to sit rather than to fix. Scripture keeps a whole psalm of a man's frailty without correcting him, and the Holy Spirit is the One who is present in a chair at the edge of a floor rather than waiting out on it.

That is what grace does here. Not a repair, and not a lesson. Presence, at the table, at twenty past nine, in the exact place where the loss is.

And the grief is allowed to be a grief. That is the other half of it and it needs saying plainly, because most people in your position have quietly decided that mourning your own body is self pity and have shut it down before it can get going. It is not self pity. Something real has gone, and something that mattered, and the fact that nobody died does not make it nothing. There are photographs on four walls.

You are permitted to grieve this in front of God, tonight, at the table, without tidying it up first. The written word carries Psalm 39 exactly as the man said it, His Spirit is the One who kept it, and there is no version of God's love for you that requires you to have finished being sad.

You were the same man on the floor and you are the same man in the chair. Scripture never once measures a person by what their knees can do, and the Holy Spirit does not deal with a diminished version of you when you sit down.